The AI doom loop is real. How can we harness its strength? | The Excerpt

On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: As the world changes, we must adapt to it. Enter AI. Type ‘losing jobs to AI’ in your search engine and the headlines generated: AI will shrink workforces, AI blamed for the most job losses ever, AI is coming for the professional class – are stark. How can we break out of the AI doom loop and focus on using it to our advantage? Best-selling author and life coach Jim Frawley joins The Excerpt to discuss how to not only embrace change, but master it.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, August 4, 2024. As the world changes, we must adapt to it. Enter AI. Type losing jobs to AI in your search engine, and the headlines generated, "AI will shrink workforces. AI blamed for the most job losses ever. AI is coming for the professional class or Stark." How can we break out of the AI doom loop and focus on using it to our advantage? Joining us now to discuss not only how to embrace change, but master it, is bestselling author and life coach, Jim Frawley. Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Jim.

Jim Frawley:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

AI has ushered in a lot of uncertainty. How do you prepare for change when you don't know what change is coming?

Jim Frawley:

As things continue to evolve so quickly and changes are happening so quickly? What I tell people to do is reframe the change. Change is a distraction. If you're trying to keep up with change, you're constantly going to fall behind. You have no anchor because you're following the change. And so reframing and recognizing the change is simply a distraction. There is one constant through all change, and that is the person responding to it. Macro change requires a focus on the micro individual, and by focusing on you and your response mechanism and your ability to make swift decisions is your ultimate response mechanism to response to whatever change it is that comes with you.

Dana Taylor:

Jim, I know that one of your unshakable core beliefs is that human beings are capable of amazing things. How does AI factor in terms of both personal growth and professional growth?

Jim Frawley:

AI is so significant because it's fundamentally changing and questioning who we are as human beings because all of our assumptions leading up to this point are really out the window, and so we have to really ask ourselves, what does it mean to be human? What are we capable of? We are capable of amazing things. The fear of AI and all of the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with massive levels of change, societal levels of change, when we are able to find out what it is that's important to us, the belief system that we have in place to build our individual anchor, then we're able to have a good positioning, good starting point to respond to all of the AI or whatever change it is that's coming. We have to focus on the one person because we are capable of adapting. We've been adapting for so long, and this will be just one more iteration of change that we have to respond to.

Dana Taylor:

The changes brought on by AI, as you've said, have been swift. What are your thoughts on the importance of making rapid adjustments versus going at your own pace?

Jim Frawley:

Well, a lot of the work that comes with responding to change happens before the change comes. When we think about the arc of change management, we'll call it the arc of responding to change, it really starts with awareness. We know that change is coming, but then we have to do the preparation. I put preparation into three types. One is your physical preparation. We have to take care of our bodies, our diet, your fitness, your sleep. But there's mental preparation as well. What do you believe? How do you take care of yourself when things go off the track? Do you love yourself in a certain type of way? Have you accepted yourself so that you're comfortable with the decisions that you have?

I would argue you don't have a belief system in place until you can understand why someone believes something different. You cannot know something and believe something at the same time. We believe that this change is coming. We believe that this is going to be impactful, but most things aren't as bad or as good as we think it's going to be. It falls somewhere in the middle. As you prepare, you then become a learner and you start asking yourselves questions. The definition of a question, which many people don't know, is a request for information where you legitimately do not know the answer.

When we don't know the answer, it opens up so much possibility to eliminate judgment, to eliminate assumptions of what we're capable of, of what the response mechanism should be, where we can get feedback, where we can learn from other people. It opens up a lot of avenues to that next final step, which is wisdom. We can use that wisdom to inform our decisions as change continues to evolve.

Dana Taylor:

We hear a lot about both the amount and the sources of data consumed by these LLMs, or large language models. That data was created by us. While the growth of AI feels exponential, is it still dependent on the creativity of human beings? What are your thoughts there?

Jim Frawley:

You said the keyword. It's creative. When I think about what makes us uniquely human and we see so many things... Many of the people that I'm talking to now, they just feel like things are happening too quickly. Where did the time go? The time is still the same. It's just so many things are happening. We don't quite know how to adapt to it. We don't know what to do with our time. What makes us uniquely human? Yes, large language models are recreating the work that we've already done. I think often of journalists in this kind of thing. AI could write an article, but a journalist has to know why a story needs to be written. That's what makes us human.

When we think about students, and fine AI can write their papers, we still have to articulate why the paper needs to be written. What makes us human, when I think about where you spend time and where you can lose track of time is what do you do when you just completely lose track where you're fully creative? When we think about creative, we think about artists and writers and everything else, but what are you creating, whether it's at work or anything else? Creation could be an idea. A creation could be a hobby. Are you creating a new running path that you've never done before?

I mean, it's really asking these questions about what's interesting and what's unique. All of that is creativity. When we think about the meaning of life and the meaning of self-development and creating our purpose or creating this idea of what's possible and creating a new idea what's possible for us, that's what makes us uniquely human, and that puts us in a much better head space for responding to whatever AI is so that it can serve you and support you as you're continuing to do those interesting things that make you unique and human.

Dana Taylor:

AI will continue to be part of the future of how we work. Is there a secret not only to adapting, but thriving in the age of AI?

Jim Frawley:

One person said it. It's equivalent to the rise of human life on earth. I don't think we fully appreciate the amount of changes that are going to come from AI. We have to accept the fact that it's going to be coming. That's one. But to thrive in it and to accept it, we have to say, how do we understand at least portions of it? How does it go back to serving us as an individual? How do you use AI to create a new training plan? How do you use AI to create a new diet plan or a new food plan for the family and come up with something creative and interesting?

AI is designed to make things easier. Life may not get easier, but it's designed to help us do these different types of things that we normally wouldn't have time for. Yes, we fill up our time with all of these different types of things, and it could be overwhelming, but finding that balance of your belief system, what you need, the self-care, it's really there's a responsibility component to this. There's an accountability on the individual. Oftentimes, we think about what AI is going to do for us. It will serve us provided we lay the groundwork that we need to use AI to get what it is that we really want need as we go day to day.

Dana Taylor:

What are some of the things for workers to consider when evaluating and understanding their value to the organization they work for?

Jim Frawley:

We're in a capitalist society, so we sit and ultimately your job has to provide value to the business. Many people forget about that. They want the job to give them purpose. They want the job to give all these things. Yes, that's what it does, but as we sit and think about the upending, AI is really changing the way management thinks about people in general. I work with a lot of organizations on this, what assumptions have we built in? Do we really need 150 people in marketing? That's the question. It's not what can AI replace? It's do we really need 150 people in marketing or 150 people in finance or whatever it is?

They're changing the question of what can we do with less amounts of people? If we're taking a look at the workplace, we have to create value for the bottom line of the business. Just because you're fundamentally doing a particular role, it's got to expand beyond that, and you need to think in terms of years, not just day-to-day, "I could put this paper over here." We're thinking about things in terms of years and how does this grow the business, impact the business in a really positive way so that you are relevant. Relevance is really the key word, and how do you remain relevant as things continue to change.

Dana Taylor:

Do you have any practical advice for turning fear about job insecurity and economic uncertainty brought on by AI on its head? How might we use AI to increase job security and personal prosperity?

Jim Frawley:

The key to remaining relevant in the workplace is in-person social interaction. I will die on that hill 100%. The relationships you build as you are networking, as you are working with people, these are the people that will help you position yourself. If some kind of thing happens at work where you need to find a new type of role, it will help you question that belief system. As you're meeting new people and having these conversations on what is really relevant, you have these types of conversations with people in different industries and different groups within your organization.

You're building this network of people, of these relationships when they like you. When you have a job and you're doing good stuff and they really like you, you're building these people who will help you and support you. We are humans. We are social beings. The whole front part of the brain is built that way. It's our sixth sense. The in-person social interaction is the best, most practical way. Go out and grab coffee, go pop out at a networking event, go find a running club, go find some kind of thing where you're just meeting new people, getting new perspectives so that you can internalize that and rethink what's relevant to you and how you can remain relevant to the people around you.

Dana Taylor:

Jim, is a healthy sense of FOMO, the fear of missing out, a good thing when it comes to AI? Is it just time for all of us to get with the program?

Jim Frawley:

FOMO is big. I think the first part to understanding AI or getting to respond to AI is understanding it. That's number one. You can have the FOMO, but you still have to understand what it can do, so play with it. I would say just do it in a very casual way, play with it, get experience, because it's changing the way we request things. As it evolves, you have to be very specific in the way that you're asking these language modules or anything else to give you information. Eventually, it will bifurcate and go in so many different directions that you're going to have to take a selection on which way you want to go, but you have to have some kind of fundamental understanding of it.

Now is a really easy time to ease into it. Don't worry about five years in the future, you can't control it. You can't predict it. Don't even worry about it. Focus on what you can do today to familiarize yourself with AI and use it just for the fun stuff, the meal plans, the training plans, whatever it is that you want to do. As you do that, you could start to say, "Oh, I could use this to make this easier or this easier. I could ask this question." As you become more familiar and you become better with it, it becomes less scary. We become less scared and less fearful of things as we become more familiar with them.

Dana Taylor:

Finally, another thing generated by AI are high levels of stress. What's been the role of self-care on your journey, and what are some of the key takeaways you'd like to share?

Jim Frawley:

With AI, with massive amounts of change, we need an anchor to bring us back to ourselves. When we think about stress and the parasympathetic nervous system, it can get fairly technical. I heard an exercise once, which was phenomenal, is when you think about someone who helped you and you tell that story and you get this emotional feeling, that is the only way to respond to stress is the parasympathetic nervous system where you're calm and you feel comfortable and you've surrendered and you're patient, and all of these things.

We could constantly explore different ways. It's a walk in the woods. It's spending time with your family. All of these things can be good. Everybody recharges in a different way, but it comes down to you to figure out what that recharge is. Test out different things. Try running, try yoga, try pickleball, whatever it is, try something new and different where you could just lose that track of time and you feel well and you feel good. We have to come back into ourselves so that we can have that anchor as we respond to different types of change. Ultimately, it's all internal. Stress is internal. Everything crazy around you can happen, but how we respond in a stressful way, we have to figure it out ourselves.

Dana Taylor:

Thank you so much for joining me, Jim.

Jim Frawley:

Thank you for having me. I love it.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our Senior Producer, Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our Executive Producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.